Tweet freedom

This article was taken from the January issue of Wired UK
magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before
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I came of age in the era when writers filed stories using Tandys
- hand-held word processors that were sold on high streets for
£100. I transmitted my stories not by Bluetooth, but by dictating
words from the dull green screen into a satellite telephone at a
cost of $50 a minute. And in the Middle East, where I did much of
my early work, I came across news not via an RSS feed or Twitter
channel, but by word of mouth.

Of course, I had expected to find things changed when I returned
to Egypt for Wired to report on the local internet
explosion and in particular on the work of the country's political
bloggers. But what I found amazed me. Here, the internet is not
(just) the domain of cheap "generic drugs" and phishing emails but
a force for political change that the government may have
accidentally unleashed upon itself and which it may now be
powerless to stop.

My first big story was in the late 80s, at the time of the first
Palestinian intifada ("uprising"). In those days, telephones were
dangerous - they could be monitored. Besides, people in refugee
camps did not have landlines and, of course, mobiles did not exist.
Instead, young Palestinian activists - known as the
al-shabbab - photocopied leaflets and distributed them
during Friday prayers at mosques. They were big risk-takers and
moved from village to village on foot, after the nightly curfew,
carrying their leaflets in plastic bags. Communication took place
through personal contact - you knocked on a door and spoke to a
human being, face-to-face.

Globalisation, and the second Palestinian intifada, which
erupted in 2000, changed the way the internet was viewed in the
Middle East for ever. The intifada, which started after Israeli
Likud leader Ariel Sharon made a provocative visit to the Temple
Mount in Jerusalem, became the region's first internet-fuelled
conflict. Online activists called for solidarity with the
Palestinians through Yahoo Groups, forums and email exchanges. As
had happened in the US in the 60s, universities became hotbeds of
activism. But, instead of being run by stoner hippies, this
revolution was engineered by a new generation of technologically
literate computer kids - very smart coders who would be perfectly
at home in Silicon Valley.

Since then, the liberalising effects of the internet have been
felt across the Middle East - Iran's recent wave of citizen
journalism was more informative about its elections than al-Jazeera
or the BBC. But it is Egypt, the region's business leader and its
most populous country, that is at the forefront of the explosion.
Egyptian bloggers are using online tools to escape censorship and
political repression, as well as to spread news. They blog about
regional politics and about local issues: workers' rights; women's
rights; when president Hosni Mubarak might finally step down; how
to prevent his son, Gamal, from stepping into his father's shoes...
And they are being heard.

Internet campaigns have a habit of transforming themselves in a
way that even their authors cannot predict. And sometimes those
transformations are groundbreaking. When Israel went into the West
Bank as part of Operation Defensive Shield in March 2002, there
were violent demonstrations in Egypt, the details of which were
passed on via the internet. But soon they had a more local
agenda.

"[The protests] started out as pro-Palestinian and ended up
anti-Mubarak," says Hossam el-Hamalawy, one of Egypt's most
prominent bloggers and activists.

El-Hamalawy's blog The Arabist
gets 3,000 hits a day and is one of the most widely read in the
country. As a child of the computer era, he is also a social
historian of Egypt's role in Middle Eastern online social activism.
One friend in Cairo describes him as "probably the most influential
blogger in Egypt today". But his fame has not come without a price
and his relaxed manner is in some ways a façade: like many of the
young activists I spoke to in Egypt, he has been arrested multiple
times, has had his cameras smashed, cannot get press credentials
and is banned from covering government events.

El-Hamalawy remembers that magical online moment when the news
shifted from pan-Middle Eastern events towards local news, and the
Egyptian blogosphere was born: "Back in 2002, at the Operation
Defensive Shield demos, I heard anti-Mubarak chanting for the first
time," he says when we meet in one of the thousands of Wi-Fi cafés
in Cairo. "The internet brought us room to manoeuvre on local
issues." The March 2003 invasion of Iraq also triggered spontaneous
anti-war protest, which then blossomed into a two-day mass
demonstration against the Mubarak regime. "When the Islamists
launched an insurrection here in 1992," he says, "there was heavy
censorship, even though people were being shot in the street. If a
whole village had been wiped out then, no one would have known,
because our newspapers are government-controlled. But that could
not happen now," he smiles, "because now we have Twitter." In fact,
the next day el-Hamalawy is at a demonstration five hours from
Cairo. The police arrive and detain the Wired
photographer. In a flash, el-Hamalawy puts the news up on
Twitter.

On my first day in Cairo, a Friday and the start of the Muslim
weekend, a young journalist called Laila drives me to meet
el-Hamalawy. The bumper sticker on her car reads: "Stop bitching -
start a revolution!" She yaps on her mobile and blasts out The
White Stripes and beur (Arabic-French) rap music as
we head for an air-conditioned and Wi-Fi-enabled Costa Coffee on
Abbas el Akkad Street in Nasr City. This is a depressing part of
Cairo: modern, with ugly furniture stores selling plastic-covered
sofas, and fluorescent juice bars. "East Cairo... once the cradle
of civilisation," Laila sighs. Inside, we order lattes. When
el-Hamalawy arrives, he breaks out his pack of cigarettes and
starts puffing. I express surprise at how young he is. "I am 32,"
he says. "But I'm actually old - I'm second-generation."

A devout Marxist (though some blogs call him a Trotskyite) who
spends his time promoting the workers' movement, el-Hamalawy is a
product of the intellectual classes. His late father was a
professor and his mother an artist. He grew up in a large bohemian
household, speaks English with an American accent, and was educated
at the prestigious (and expensive) American University in Cairo.
Most importantly he is a graduate of CompuCamps - educational
programmes set up in the mid-80s by a group of high-flying Middle
Eastern businessmen to introduce Arab children to computing. El-
Hamalawy was nine when he attended his first camp, in 1986. "You
won't meet anyone here in my age group in the IT world who did not
pass through those camps," he says. "It was a beautiful scheme."
With the romanticism of someone recalling an old love rather than
the early days of computing, he speaks of emails as SMTPs, and
about when it took 20 minutes to dial up a network.

El-Hamalawy calls himself a "pure" Marxist. He spends long hours
driving cross-country on "Death Road", as the motorway outside
Cairo is known, going to demonstrations and factory strikes, trying
to give a voice to those who have none. For this he has been
regularly harassed, but he shrugs that off as fate, or
maktoub ("it is written").

"The government dug their own grave in 1992," he says, "in
establishing the Ministry of Communications and Information
Technology." When the cyber-market opened up, the ministry made it
its policy to keep the internet open to encourage business
investment. This contrasts with, for example, Tunisia and Syria,
says el-Hamalawy, "which blocked everything". This commitment to
openness, el-Hamalawy feels, was "an ambitious attempt to make
Egypt the next India". People will not do business if your internet
is restricted, he says. "And, while we are censored, this is not
China." (That said, Wired's repeated attempts to interview
the minister of communications are refused, particularly once his
assistant learns that we are speaking to bloggers.)

By 2003, says el-Hamalawy, an embryonic blogosphere was forming.
In 2004, after the Kefaya ("enough") movement - a coalition of
secular activists against Mubarak - launched, its concerns switched
from the pan-Arabic to the Egyptian. But the real push within the
blogosphere came after the events of Black Wednesday on May 25,
2005, when pro-Mubarak thugs attacked young activists protesting
against him, and female journalists were sexually harassed. One of
these was Nora Younis, a press photographer and one of 30 women
picked from the protesters and penned into a garage, where,
witnesses said, members of the Egyptian police force beat and
sexually assaulted them. When the women were released, many had
been stripped and were left half-naked and sobbing. Younis
submitted a CD of photographs as part of a lawsuit against the
police. When the state declined to press charges, Younis went
online and became a fixture in the protest movement and on its
associated websites, known across the country as the curly-haired
girl holding up photographs of the interior minister, Habib El-
Adly, and the police commander accused of responsibility for the
assaults, emblazoned with calls for their imprisonment.

"Many of those present were bloggers," says el-Hamalawy. "They
were horrified at what they saw. That was the point at which they
became radicalised. They went home and called on fellow bloggers to
speak out."

Ultimately, the goal of most Middle Eastern political bloggers
is to spread the internet to the masses, along the lines of
Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop per Child ideology. "This opens up
the world to everyone, rich or poor," says el-Hamalawy. And it
looks as if Egypt is beginning to get there. Every Cairo corner
seems to have a café where you can get online if you buy a
latte.